Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of InnovationReally intrigued by the title. Fabulously diverse in examples. If you ever felt like a square in round world, this book will make you sing for joy because that's what life is about--growing, moving, evolving.... The book is much stronger for being in Science section and not restricted to business innovation alone.

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Oct 24, 2005

An Internet Fed Mostly by Amateurs is Fascinating

"I don't want to read blogs by political extremists, listen to podcasts recorded by droning amateurs, or watch videos produced by talentless would-be directors - even though the Internet makes all that possible.

I want to get my news from highly skilled professionals, listen to music by the world's most brilliant performers and composers, and be entertained by big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas.

Of course, I'm biased. I make my living writing this column, and my paycheck is threatened if everyone decides freely available blogs -- even at lesser quality -- are an acceptable substitute.

Carr concludes: "The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.''

Amen!? I typically enjoy Mike Langberg's columns. But where the heck do Nicholas Carr and Langberg think talent comes from? Does it plop up wholly formed in the sea foam like greek goddess Aphrodite?

Or does the granting of a degree from an accredited film school or art school or journalism school now stamp one with the Good Housekeeping seal of approval?

Should Bill Gates or Steve Jobs meekly crawl back and complete their professional degrees?

Or does it sometimes come from passion, gumption, inspiration, and the sheer love of it?

Why whine that the talent pond got bigger? What ever happened to that little old adage, Let the market decide?

There's probably too much Kool-Aid and hype over Web 2.0 to be sure. It's the disdain for amateurs that riles me up. Making sure we're on the same page: amateur, definition from Wikipedia (he, he):

The other, perhaps somewhat obsolescent usage, stems from the French form of the Latin root of the word meaning a "lover of". (See amateurism.) In this sense, retaining its French inflexion ("am-a-tEUR"), an amateur may be as competent as a paid professional, yet is motivated by a love or passion for the activity, like a connoisseur. In the 17th and 18th centuries virtuoso had similar connotations of passionate involvement.

Yesterday Dave Winer waxed on about openness and spoke of Silicon Valley exuding a "sense that this place is come as you are, no invite required". Dave nails precisely why I moved here myself from an invite-only state (which now that you mention it, invite-only events were the rage there):

This is why I came to Silicon Valley in 1979, when I was 24 years old. In Madison there were people writing software, smart people (some) but I wanted to make software at a different level. I wanted to make stuff that changed everything, that opened closed doors, that gave people power that used to only belong to the rich and old. Like an open conference, I needed to give something up to get there. But there was no gatekeeper at the door to Silicon Valley telling me I needed an invite. The door was open because not only is that a value of the web, but it's also a value of Silicon Valley, even if some people usurp that. - "Like a Bloggercon", Dave Winer's Scripting News

At the recent Accelerating Change Conference, Steve Jurvetson shared his emphasis on biological metaphors in technology and science. And how it's infiltrated the way venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson funds companies: new ideas are on the emergent edge, on the fringes. So they make sure they have an open call model. They actually read every single business plan they get, with or without a social tie, because by definition their social hub isn't the fringe.

At the same conference, Mark Finnern of SAP shared they'd just hired their #2 contributor to their online SAP developer network in-house. "He'd have never made it through our HR filters," Mark confessed. But his raw talent and passion for what he did and the community was exposed for all to see.

The so-called "cult of the amateur" means one fed up with their stultifying day job can start doodling cartoons on the backs of business cards. And upload them online. And after a few years people seek you out to doodle for them. For Kim Polese and Budget Rental Car.

So it's an Open Call age. But the cult of the amateur isn't anything novel in the Valley. It precedes Web 1.0.

Don Valentine (think financier behind Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, Electronic Arts and Oracle) reminesces in an oral history of the Valley about one particular amateur:

Public relations guru Regis McKenna recalls that first meeting because he put the two visionaries in touch:

[T]he first time he met Jobs, a long-haired, brash youngster who wore t-shirts, cut-off jeans and sandals... McKenna recalls: "Valentine called me afterward and said, `Why have you sent me this renegade from the human race?'"

"They were the renegades of the computer industry," recalls [Regis] McKenna. "It was a grassroots movement, with a social dimension not unlike civil rights or the environment."

The microcomputer revolutionaries believed big business - which they equated with big computers - was not to be trusted. McKenna attended computer club meetings: "They had discussions around not connecting microcomputers to the mainframe because then they would be controlled by them." They didn't need to worry. Few in Silicon Valley paid attention to them.

My observation on what's happening in media resembles the personal computer revolution: LSD, Litmus Tests, Hackers and Blogging for Dollars. (Please note that Apple didn't kill IBM. They co-exist in the market. And with Taligent they even partnered together once; ok, now defunct but when do any of these joint ventures work?)

THERE'S ONLY SO MANY TALENT MYTHS IN THE WORLD

"[Barry] Diller made what I consider to be some obvious statements, like, "there's only so much talent in the world," suggesting that there are limits to what amateurs can accomplish, says the OnoTech blog in "Web 2.0 -- amateur vs. professional."

If we keep telling ourselves that, well, we might just believe it. "Artmaking has been around longer than the art establishment. Through most of history, the people who made art never thought of themselves as making art," say authors David Bayles and Ted Orland in Art and Fear.

I'm with Dan Gillmor, "Web 2.0, Journalism and Nicholas Carr": "I celebrate the amateur, meanwhile, because the amateurs are rediscovering their voicesafter a dark age when they were assumed to be nothing but consumers."

This past Saturday I met a credentialled filmmaker (film school, works as videographer, blah blah) whose working on a documentary film - on her own terms. Asked about her distribution plans, she says she'll cross that bridge later. She's self-assured although she quips: "Even if we just a few DVD parties to show it, that's fine." Even 'talented' people get fed up watching their original, signature voices squashed. Even 'talented' people get fed up watching their talent squandered.

We'll not take away your King Kong or The Matrix. Sure, I watch big-budget. And gritty low-budget independents. I'm an avowed Sundance junkie (hmm, this film fest post is called Democratization of Creativity). And when one thinks Sundance has gone too mainstream, there are a half-dozen other film festivals piggybacking on their heels. Most of these films will never be seen in any other theater.

Far too many sketches, scripts, photos, films, and journal scribblings lay completely hidden privately because the book agent didn't call back, or they didn't have an 'in' to Hollywood. It's not necessarily about making it big, the thing is just dying to get out.

I've been blogging and writing continuously for 21 months (not counting a few months at an abandoned blog). I feel as I've not hit my stride - yet. If you throw enough pots, you will be a master potter.

So where does talent come from? Mastery? In a post on art, Taos and brands, titled Signature Voices, I begin:

I first admired R.C. Gorman's work when I first moved to the West, to Salt Lake City. You can spot his unique work in any line-up. Walking into his gallery tucked on Ledoux Street last week, there was a particular painting, Woman in Canyon de Chelley, that struck me. Damn, I should have bought his work 12 years ago. The price tag: $65,000.

In the gallery, I flip through a cookbook (the theme: food and nudes). It's Gorman's early work. More like you might notice in any talented art student's sketchbook. If you pay attention though, you can begin to see a trace of his style, his stamp, his voice emerging.

In the same post, I mention I was caught off guard by a nondescript 1903 painting by Georgia O'Keefe (that's classic O'Keefe left and not the oriental cherry blossoms painting). It's identical to any rank amateur just fresh out of art school's attempt at cherry blossom branches with a Zen flair. Not distinctive O'Keefe. Judging by dates on her other work, I surmised: "She clearly came into her own in the next decade."

That's a decade, hmmm. Take a peek at this research:

Andres Ericsson is a psychologist who studied Expert and Exceptional Performance in individuals as diverse as chess players, musicians, computer programming, bridge, athletes, and physicists. He has brought a remarkable new insight to the age-old question of whether expert performance is because of exceptional talent (or nature) or because of long hours of effort usually led by parents or adults (or nurture). His conclusion covered areas as broad as motor performance in sports, music, and medicine with the conclusion that, regardless of talent, expert and exceptional performers achieved that status by effort. All have put in about ten years and 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in their development. How does practice improve talent so much? We adapt to domain specific restraints. We develop anticipatory skills. You know as a diagnostician what is possible or likely and learn to anticipate what we will find or do. Soccer and hockey goalies, for example, do not have better reaction times than other players. Constant practice and accumulated knowledge allow them to anticipate shots. Their expertise is not a natural gift but a learned mastery of their craft.

Ten years and 10,000 hours of practice—that means three hours of practice per day. In addition, practice is not defined the same as performing what we already know. Lounge musicians who simply play are not getting better unless they are deliberately practicing, that is, doing work may be not considered fun but a deliberate and concentrated effort to improve skills. - from 2004 AOSSM Presidential Address

I've been reading The Extraordinary Leader by John H. Zenger and Joseph Folkman. The authors make a brief reference to a study by K. Anders Ericsson and Neil Charness published in 1994 called "Expert Performance: Its Structure and Acquisition". The article, which talks about sports and music prodigies, is summed up by the following:

The traditional view of talent, which concludes that successful individuals have special innate abilities and basic capacities, is not consistent with the reviewed evidence...More plausible loci of individual differences are factors that predispose individuals toward engaging in deliberate practice and enable them to sustain high levels of practice for many years.

Hmmm, sounds like passion is the key to sustained practice.....

While the frontal lobes may be important for providing the judgment and flexibility of thought that underlies talent, structures in the temporal lobes and limbic system supply drive and motivation, which [neurologist and writer, Alice] Flaherty believes are more important parts of the creative equation than talent itself. This applies not only to writing, but to all kinds of creative ability.

"To be truly creative chess player," she says, "probably just loving the game and playing it ten hours a day may be more important than having some special pattern recognition ability in your brain." (from March 2005 National Geographic, "What's In Your Mind?" issue)

Voila! The formula, please: Passion + Practice = Artiste. I don't think that's the precise formula exactly, but it's a close enough approximation. Passion is the fuel that drives amateurs (insert French inflection and accent yourself).

Andthe Internet is our open studio to throw pots, take up a brush, collaborate on jam sessions, squiggle cartoons and practice, practice, practice. Anyone can drop into the studio without an appointment. Sometimes it's a work in progress. And sometimes you walk into a masterpiece.

As a renowned documentary filmmaker (once an amateur whom trained herself by getting her hands on a camera and just-doing-it) once shared with me, "There's a secret. If you put in the effort, the universe has a matching grant program. And it'll meet you halfway every time."

[Ansel] Adams disliked the uniformity of the education system and left school in 1915 to educate himself. He originally trained himself as a pianist, but Yosemite and the camera diverted his interest toward photography.

[T]he shadowcatcher Ansel Adams, who believed that his camera was a combination of machine and spirit, wrote in his autobiography about one afternoon that shaped his destiny. He was married in his twenties and still living with his mother and his aunt. The time had come when he had to choose between his two great passions - photography and piano. His wife, Virginia, told him she would support him in whatever he believed to be his true calling, but his mother pleaded in anguish, "Do not give up the piano!" The camera cannot express the human soul!"

Comments

I find Langberg's comment about "the hegemony of the amateur" highly ironic considering that it is the other way around. We are, in fact, being freed from the hegemony of "the professional" - a relatively recent development in which professional groups were established (eg. medical doctors) in an attempt to monopolize their control over a specific practice. Being a professional is more about supporting the existence of a certifying body than supporting any higher standard.

The 20th century witnessed the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organisations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it.

The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought.

Great post! I'm reading OPEN LOOPS right now, and I'm still in the passages on the birth of Apple, so the Valley comparison is apt for my intellectual diet right now.

This elitist notion that if an experienced professional isn't vetting all new talent before letting them in is just insulting. The increasingly routine churning of industry rankings (and, for that matter, whole industries) might be disheartening if you've reached the top, but it's the way progress is made. If the pros want to keep their job, they have to improve offerings to the point where they're worth what's being charged, or find a way to drop prices to what the wares are worth in the market.

I think what they're really afraid of is not that amateurs will take over; ultimately, I think the best few voices (or business models) will float to the top and be "the new professionals," while the amatuers stay more or less where they are now.

What they're afraid of is that they have no say in how, or to whom, that torch is passed, and it isn't likely to be them and theirs. What they fear isn't a world without professionals, but a world where they have to compete, on equal terms, against ANYBODY with talent who feels like trying out, and they and their cronies have no say in how the results are judged.

How funny, I had just 2 minutes before reading your post hung up with the snooty Delaware members-only clubhttp://www.universityandwhistclub.com/ declining me as an attendee to their Tipping Point book club discussion tomorrow. I have always thought the inclusionary culture of the west coast to be a much more useful societal model.

A great rich post, I appreciate the complex themes. I agree that amateurs can become artistes, and the way is likely through discipline. However, sometimes passion for a field can be lost with sustained practice; turn your hobby into a job and you may not like it any more. Sustaining passion while practicing is a piece of the puzzle to me as well.

Blogging has given polymath dabblers a voice, and there is probably a role for this talent even if it doesn't through discipline lead to Artistes. Most of what I consider talent is outside of Barry Diller's definition, which of course is precisely the point of democratic web and life 2.0.

Very inspiring. as long as you have it in your heart and you have the drive the rest will follow in time. I've always believed that.

followed Sacha's article on diyplanner.com here...

Some people draw the line between developing artists and professionals. If there's a choice I'd rather see myself as developing for the next fifty years. There is always more to learn and ways to grow, and we all have to start somewhere.

Wasn't Eintein a clerk in a patent office when he made his greatest discoveries? Oftentimes it seems to be "outsiders", those on the edges of the system that are the ones to make the greastest contributions and see outside the box.